Why are so many people who are opposed to development nevertheless in favor of "redevelopment"?
The short answer is that development involves decisions made in the market by large numbers of people in the general population, in their own personal interests, while redevelopment involves taking decisions out of the hands of the population at large and putting the power to make those decisions in the hands of elites.
Developers who build housing to sell to the public are the focus of many denunciations by elites in places like coastal California. But developers would not even exist if there were not vastly larger numbers of people ready to buy or rent what they build.
All these people who make the developers' work economically viable vanish into thin air in political rhetoric that is focused on the developer and his "greed."
The people who are against development dare not come right out and say in plain English that they want other people's desires squashed by the government, so that the desires of the small, self-congratulatory elites can prevail, while housing prices
skyrocket because of the restricting on building.
If development is considered to be so bad, why is redevelopment considered to be good, by many of the same people?
Continue reading Thomas Sowell…
(photo credit: Eric Fischer)
